Feeling creative? After you’ve scanned out slew of changes shipping in the new Blender 4.3 release, you’ll find it hard not to!
Blender 4.3 is the latest stable release of the phenomenally powerful open-source 3D modelling software.
Its creators say the update builds on the Blender 4.2 LTS release earlier this year with “improvements to existing tools, performance enhancements, and the foundations that will shape the years to come.”
I’ll recap the key changes in a second, but first I want to highlight a couple of big things that Linux users will be interested to know…
Blender 4.3: Big Linux Changes
The first, Blender 4.3 offers an experimental option to use Vulkan to render the user interface. Given that Vulkan is said to do that kind of thing better than OpenGL the switch could improve UI performance in general, but especially for older/integrated GPUs.
Not yet though as Blender notes the Vulkan backend “can be slower compared to OpenGL” at present. This is why it’s labelled as experimental and explicitly opt-in. The idea is to gather feedback, bug reports, and so on to improve it going forward.
To enable the Vulkan backend in Blender 4.3 first go to Preferences > Interface and enable Developer Extras. Then, go to System > Backend and change OpenGL to Vulkan (experimental). Restart Blender, and set your preferred GPU.
Right now, Vulkan in Blender 4.3 works with:
- NVIDIA GTX900 and up (official drivers only)
- AMD RX 400 series and up (officially drivers)
- Legacy AMD GPUs + Intel UHD, Iris, and Arc (Mesa drivers)
Second big deal is that Blender 4.3 supports hardware accelerated ray-tracing on Linux using the open-source HIP-RT libraries from AMD.
This could provide Linux users with faster render times for scenes/projects using complex lighting, reflections, and shadows if they have an AMD GPU.
Blender 4.3: What’s New?
Each version of Blender comes chock-full of change, and this one is no different.
As I’m not much of a 3D modeller—I struggle to spatially understand real life, let alone map things out in virtual planes—I won’t embarrass myself by trying to explain the impact the following improvements will have.
But a top-level overview:
- Multi-pass compositing support added to EEVEE
- Light & Shadow Linking in EEVEE brings feature parity with Cycles
- New Brush management system using asset libraries
- Brushes updated, some new ones added, performance improved
- Grease Pencil:
- Rewritten to improve performance
- New Layer Groups feature
- Uses the new brush asset system
- New tool to edit fill gradients
- Assorted Draw tool tweaks
- Eraser tool now allows strokes to be “cut”
- Metallic BSDF node added to shader editor
- New Gabor Noise texture node added to renderer
- Volume Scattering node gains more phase functions
- Geometry Nodes now work with Grease Pencil data
- Video sequencer:
- Supports connecting strips to move/transform
- Sequencer Preview supports snapping
- Thumbnails on strips enabled by default
- Faster clip thumbnail generation
- Multi-threaded video proxy downscaling
- SVG icons used throughout the app
- Maximum resolution is now based on system memory
Plus a lot more – the bullets above is barely scratching the surface.
You can see and hear more about these changes from the people who made them by swotting over slick feature overview on the Blender release page.
Install Blender on Ubuntu
Blender is free, open-source software available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Older versions of Blender are available to install from the Ubuntu repo. Either install using your preferred GUI frontend or pop open a new terminal window and run sudo apt install blender to get it.
To install the latest version of Blender you can get it from the Snap Store, or by downloading a binary from the official Blender website.
On Linux the recommended system requires ask for a distro equipped with glibc 2.28 or newer (Ubuntu has this), a quad-core CPU with SSE4.2 support, 8GB RAM, and a dedicated GPU with at least 2GB VRAM and support for OpenGL 4.3.